Pandemic pushes harder Greek refugee policy, but also solidarity

A group of 50 children from overcrowded migrant camps in Greece arrived in the German city of Hanover on Saturday [Fabian Bimmer/Reuters]

Athens, Greece - A group of 50 unaccompanied migrant children were sent by Greece to Germany on Saturday, the first major wave of some 1,600 intended for relocation to other European Union members.

The children were between the ages of five and 16, and were taken from overcrowded camps on the islands of Lesbos, Chios and Samos. Another dozen had departed for Luxembourg on Wednesday.

"In the era of coronavirus, this act of solidarity by the German government is very much appreciated," said Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who saw the children off at Athens airport. "Dealing with the migration crisis should be a European responsibility. We should be burden-sharing," he said.

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Greece has been asking for such European solidarity for months, but until last month its calls were not being heard. Almost as soon as he came to power in July last year, Mitsotakis started pressing the EU for help with some 5,400 more children with which Greece says it cannot cope. Greece is providing shelter, education and psychological support for some 1,400 minors who are seeking asylum in Europe, and is trying to raise that number to 2,000 by summer.

No takers came forward until the coronavirus crisis, which coincided with a geopolitical crisis in the Aegean. On February 27, Turkey declared it was opening its borders to asylum Leseekers headed for Europe, effectively suspending an agreement struck with the EU in March 2016. Although Turkey also has a border with EU member Bulgaria, in practice Turkish authorities assisted refugees only to the Greek border, creating enormous pressure on Greek authorities.

On March 9, Germany announced it had formed a coalition of EU members able to take on at least 1,600 unaccompanied minors from Greece. Coronavirus may have acted as a catalyst, but it has also contributed to a hardening of attitudes.

Factbox

Greece has implemented emergency measures at refugee camps during the coronavirus crisis, including: - Island camps, which are open, are being ring-fenced. - Staff are being reduced to skeleton crews. - The asylum service has stopped conducting interviews. - Quarantine tents have been set up outside the camps. - EU-funded field hospitals are boosting medical capacity.

Greece is concerned that children are especially vulnerable to the disease on its five eastern Aegean islands with overcrowded reception centres - Lesbos, Chios, Samos, Leros and Kos. Those camps, built for 6,000, now hold about 35,000. Conditions are unsanitary and difficult, and it is easy for children to go unnoticed by authorities.

"For seven months I lived on the mountains around here. I survived by doing petty jobs for people," the 17-year-old Syrian Saleh al-Moussa told Al Jazeera at Moria camp on Lesbos. "In [February] I was taken into the facility for minors, but before that I slept on the ground without blankets or a bed, I often walked barefoot and I was miserable … I knocked on doors and begged people for scraps."

Al Jazeera met several children from Afghanistan at Moria. They hadn't managed to apply for asylum after being on the island for months; the service was overwhelmed.

Coronavirus has had another benign effect - of accelerating efforts to reduce camp congestion. Greece says it has drawn off 10,000 asylum seekers since the beginning of the year and sent them to the mainland, achieving an overall drop in the camp population of five percent. Another 2,380 asylum seekers are to be shipped to the mainland in the next fortnight, and 5,000 more are being offered $2,000 each to give up their claims and return home.

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The local media has reported that a pregnant 28-year-old from Somalia - now being housed with around 470 asylum seekers, mostly from Africa, in a hotel in Argolis on the country's mainland - has tested positive for coronavirus. With a member of staff also testing positive, the hotel has been placed under quarantine.

Hardening attitudes

Coronavirus has also led to a hardening of policy here.

The spread of the virus coinciding with Turkey's border opening led Greece to declare it was suspending new asylum applications for the month of March.

"The concerted and massive nature of this movement means it has nothing to do with international law and the right of asylum, which only concerns individual cases," said government spokesman Stelios Petsas on March 1.

New arrivals were registered far from reception centres and have been kept sequestered since, partly in order to prevent possible coronavirus cases infecting those overcrowded camps. But the United Nations and the EU objected.

"[Greece] cannot suspend the internationally recognised right to seek asylum and the principle of non-refoulement that are also emphasised in EU law," the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees announced the following day. "Neither the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees nor EU refugee law provides any legal basis for the suspension of the reception of asylum applications."

Facts on the ground also punctured the government position. The first case of coronavirus on Lesbos was of a supermarket checkout worker in the town of Plomari, 42km (26 miles) south of Moria camp.

When coronavirus was first discovered among refugees on April 1, it concerned an incumbent population that had arrived long before Turkey opened its borders, and infected a total of 28 asylum seekers. The mainland camps of Ritsona and Malakasa, where they live, were quarantined.

While sequestration also remains for 2,164 asylum seekers who did manage to cross from Turkey during March, Greece is now reversing its policy of suspending their asylum rights. "The right to file for asylum is back," deputy migration minister Yiorgos Koumoutsakos told Al Jazeera earlier this month.

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"The restoration of the right to apply for asylum includes those who crossed over in March. And our purpose is to examine these applications as quickly as possible so that non-eligible applicants can go back as quickly as possible," Koumoutsakos said.

Other hardening aspects of refugee policy spurred on by fears of coronavirus have remained, however.

The government has been keen to abolish the current, open reception centres on the Aegean islands, replacing them with detention centres. These would be much larger, capable of holding 25,000-35,000 people, almost six times today's official capacity.

The islanders have resisted these new camps, but coronavirus has helped the government push the agenda. A new camp is under construction on Samos, and more are about to begin on Leros and Kos.

"We placed the protection of public health on the islands - for islanders and refugees - as a matter of priority," migration minister Notis Mitarakis said on March 18. "[The new camps] serve this goal."

Coronavirus has also affected policy across the water in Turkey. "Turkey has unfortunately refused the return of a large number of people, citing coronavirus as an excuse," Mitarakis told parliament on March 23. "We are pursuing these returns bilaterally with their home countries."

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The Melissa Network is an aid group that has offered support to refugees during the coronavirus lockdown.

"Connecting the two crises was something all of us who work with refugees were very worried about. We know that coronavirus did not start off in camps,” says the network's co-founder, Nadina Christopoulou.

The result was that refugees who had moved on to Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands suddenly asked to re-enrol in courses they had completed at the network, because they missed the sense of community.

"Being treated as individuals, with love and respect, is what they miss," Christopoulou says.

Coronavirus is also raising problems for refugees beyond public policy, as unscrupulous landlords have sought to up their rents.

"On many nights we've received calls from women on Victoria Square [in Athens] saying their landlords have doubled their rent," says Christopoulou. "People can't go and look at new apartments to rent. Landlords know this and they're blackmailing refugees."

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Greece's migration policy under the New Democracy government began to harden in 2019. A November law made appealing first-instance denials for asylum impossible without a lawyer. Last January, Greece began to fast track new applications. The migration ministry says it has speeded up processing times threefold to two months. The goal is to roughly match deportations of rejected applicants to new arrivals and prevent another pileup of applicants on the islands.

"The rules have changed," Mitarakis said on January 31. "We are not open to people without a refugee profile" - a term that remains loosely defined but is generally taken to mean nationalities ravaged by war.

Koumoutsakos warned that the softening of attitudes in April may be temporary, especially if Turkey resumes its open-border policy after the coronavirus crisis passes. "The situation at the borders is normalised again and the crisis seems to have spun out, but we're not being complacent," he said. "We retain our vigilance."